


things left in the stars

by mechanicalclock



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-28 15:25:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12609676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechanicalclock/pseuds/mechanicalclock
Summary: You don’t collect things from places that you will never visit again, that’s foolish. It's about learning to let go in all the new ways, adapting quicker and quicker, having fun and forgetting.Taako and Lup learn to remember.





	things left in the stars

A picture like so many others: two kids pulled out of home prematurely learning to survive on their own, not a penny to their name but equipped with lush dark hair, behavioral problems and enough personality to fill a room. Trust is not a currency they strive to possess, but adaptability is, and that subtle ability to pack everything up in your duffel bag in a span of five minutes and flee in haste. It can only be learnt under the specific circumstances brought by a mixture of short temper, big mouth and refusal to conform – just the two of them against the world and all that jazz.

Picture this: he’s crying and she finds him sitting by the side of the camp, the sleeve of his shirt covered in tears and snot. Her hair is getting longer, up to her shoulders by now, and his is still short, reaching maybe his chin at best, and she finally got her fingers on that beautiful pink scarf which she now wears relentlessly no matter how their current guardian might feel about it – no matter how anyone feels.

“Why are you crying?” she asks, tilting her head, her warm hand on his shoulder. Only then does she notice smaller details, like an imprint of a dirty palm on his white shirt and a growing bruise on his chin. “Who did this to you?”

He’s just sobbing for a minute, and then he spits out, “the boys from the village.”

“The boys?” she asks. “I thought you were becoming friends with them.”

“I thought so too,” he replies, “but I guess I made a mistake.”

“Maxime, too?”

“Especially Maxime,” he grins. “Hey, Lup? We don’t have this month’s money anymore.”

She tries not to let it show how much it bothers her, instead she just smiles. She notices Taako’s diary in his hands. It’s a small, dirty notebook and he’s clutching to it in a way she doesn’t like at all.

She snatches the notebook from his hands before he manages to protest and tears it in half. She tosses the pages flying into the air as she fires them up, letting them burn up before they reach the ground.

“What… why?” he asks, his eyes full of tears as he faces her.

“That’s unnecessary,” she replies, smiling the widest smile she can. “Those are just… sadness receipts. You don’t need those. The important things, the nice things, you’ll remember anyway. The others are better forgotten. Don’t you think?”

“You burnt my pecan pie recipe.”

She laughs. “You’ll make it up as you go.”

 

Or maybe this picture: the letter of rejection she holds in her hands burns her fingers much more than the fire she evokes when she’s angry, and maybe that’s why they refused her, maybe they don’t need an angry fire at the University, just the rich kids’ safety-measure-friendly flames.

He sees her eyes dancing across the letter as if she was studying it over and over again, maybe to find something new between the lines the next time.

He pulls the paper from her fingers, tears it in half. Just a click of his fingers, and the letter disappears.

She turns towards him and he sees his own face, only that Lup’s hair is now short and spiky and his is longer and he’s finally able to comb them into a braid, and her eyes are coated in pink eye shadow and she’s wearing a frilly blouse. She’s the most beautiful creature he’s ever seen and he has to make sure she’s never fighting tears like this again.

“Fuck them, man,” he says, “the people behind this are some crusty old dudes running a century old place that probably just smells of farts and nerds. You don’t need their acceptance to know you’re an awesome wizard.”

“Yeah, maybe, but I need it to get out of here,” she says, a single tear now running down her cheek.

He leans over her and wipes the tear with his finger. She lingers into his touch.

“You will. We will. Who, if not us?” he laughs. “Fuck them. Let’s go get wasted and throw stuff at their office window. Tomorrow we’ll try again, yeah? No sadness receipts.”

She laughs. “Yeah. Fuck ‘em.”

 

Picture this: the press conference that is the beginning of the rest of their lives. They leave the room and she immediately gets out of her red robe and tosses it on the ground, only to snatch it right back, giggling, “guess I won’t be able to just throw this shit away when I’m bored, am I?”

He shrugs, getting out of his own robe and throwing it away nonchalantly, letting it land straight on the head of the nerd who’s just leaving the room, Barry Bluejeans, is it? He’ll never remember.

“Whoops, sorry there, my dude,” he yawns. “Anyway, I’m totally just gonna throw it away when I’m bored. It kinda ruined my outfit anyway.”

Barry untangles himself from the robe and clutches it in his hands hopelessly, glancing at them from behind his foggy glasses, the tips of his short, all-human ears glowing red.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to wear it anyway. Regulations say so.”

“Regulations? You mean the ones that we followed here? But we’re going to space, Larry!” Lup exclaims.

“It’s Barry, actually,” he corrects her, his ears going even redder, but she’s reaching into her pockets, fishing out some forgotten papers.

“My parking tickets? Library card? Staying within this realm,” she proclaims, tearing the papers apart. Barry goes pale instead of red now, and Taako laughs. “Going blank page, baby. Except of the debts I will undoubtedly collect,” she adds, frowning. “The debts will carry on through eternity.”

“That’s kind of a… one-sided approach, don’t you think?” Barry smiles.

Taako winks at him “You bet,” he says.

 

A picture like no other before: they spend a year somewhere, and then they reset, only that their memories still stay. Back in the days, they might have called it a dream scenario, but now they’re not so sure. Apart from the painful goodbyes, there’s the awareness your arrival brings doom upon civilizations, not like it’s our fault, we’re only trying to help. The rest of the crew try to collect souvenirs, but not the two of them - you don’t collect things from places that you will never visit again, that’s foolish. It's about learning to let go in all the new ways, adapting quicker and quicker, having fun and forgetting.

The talking animals were a bit much and no matter how many times they tell themselves it was only for science and that nothing in that world carved even a tiniest scratch into their hearts, he still catches Lup crying over a bottle of wine with Barry’s offering hand in hers one evening, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel his chest tighten once or twice over breakfast. His skin itches and he’s feeling weird and uncondensed, so the first time they arrive in a planet inhabited with aliens whose thought processes and habits resemble theirs, one evening after a hard day’s work he walks into a bar and he lets his hair fall loose and then his body fall into the arms of a handsome person who kisses madly well with their long tongue and their long nails leave scratches on his back.

“Well I sure do hope they’re not poisonous,” Lup giggles, examining his badly covered hickeys in the morning, but he knows her too well not to recognize that she, not unlike him, is touch-starved and in need of distraction, and then he spots her in the same bar the night after, swept off her feet by a creature that’s been calling her the local equivalent of sweet for the whole day.

Magnus asks him for dating advice but he can’t really give him any, other than “be desperate but then again, also don’t give a fuck”. Barry sends Lup long looks behind his perpetually foggy glasses as if he had any claims over her autonomy.

Lup keeps meeting the very same person who still calls her sweet and whose skin gets a warmer shade of pink whenever they see her. 

The day of their departure Lup locks herself in her cabin. When she emerges afterwards, she’s all smiles and declares full readiness for their upcoming adventures. Taako doesn’t remember the names of his lovers and the entire planet fades away from his memory the moment they get away.

 

Picture this – it’s not a hard thing to picture: Lup kisses Barry over the piano and then closes her eyes and decides to forget it right away. She swats his hands away from her shoulder and he pulls back immediately.

“I’m sorry,” he issues in a small voice. She can sense how much his hands are sweating. “I just thought… I’m sorry if I imposed anything.”

“See you later, Barold,” she says and she gets up, but then she realizes she doesn’t want to, so she plumps back onto the chair again and she takes his face in her hands and kisses him, his glasses pressing into her chin.

“Some mixed signals you’re sending here,” he says when they break the kiss, coughing. She smiles.

“Well, get used to it, my fella,” she smiles.

 

Picture this: that one time she cut her hair completely short and it became curly and she spent the whole cycle walking around in a hat. The only good thing that came from leaving the planet in question was the return to her original hairstyle, with the one remaining proof of her mistake – a photo, now held by Taako who’s laughing himself to tears. They had too much wine and they’re tired when she says, “I wish I could just erase this hairstyle from my memory.”

Taako’s eyes light up and he takes her hand and leads her out of the kitchen and through the hall into a dark room, illuminated only by soft blue light coming out of the voidfish.

“Can be done, sister,” he says, and throws the picture into the tank.

Lup realizes they’re both laughing but she has no idea why; soon, she can feel the laughter turn into a sob and that very same night, she finds herself in Barry’s bedroom hiding her face in his shirt while Taako finished his wine and bakes three trays of brownies.

Picture this: when you realize some things can be forgotten, you realize you don’t want to remember surprisingly much. Spectacularly failed experiments, tokens of brief friendships, currency of a planet they didn’t manage to save, recipe for alien cake they all shared and hated – all those things can land in a tank and be gone forever, just blissful peace of mind left behind. Lup falls in love with every little detail about Barry and Taako dyes his hair a new color each cycle only to have it return to brown over and over again.  
One evening Lup is tired and Barry says one word too many and she yells at him and bursts into tears and Taako says, “if only we could put him into the tank, right?” and she stops crying and looks at him and whispers: “don’t ever say that again.”

Picture this: the planet they land on resembles home so much Taako manages to find fruit that tastes almost like raspberries. He bakes tarts and pies and makes sauce he puts into jars. He buys the raspberries from a man called Rin and one day Rin offers to take him along to collect them, and they spend the whole afternoon kissing in the grass and feeding each other sweet fruit and at night his stomach hurts and Lup keeps making fun of him.

Rin’s eyes are light blue and his skin is obsidian black and Taako gets him crystal jewelry that brings out his eye color and shines against his dark skin and after they find the light of creation he just spends most days kissing him – although he could have sworn the light was found the first day within his blue eyes. He must have forgotten how great it felt to be kissed good morning and how great it felt to bring someone breakfast to bed, even though he discovered the hard way that Rin, like all of his people, didn’t tolerate brown sugar. Rin loves his magic and giggles every time Taako creates an illusion of a butterfly that perches on his shoulder. They spend every night together and Taako can’t stop touching him and as he leaves trails of kisses down his spine, Taako shivers and repeats his name and he’s close to breaking down almost every instance. It’s been a long time.

The day of their departure he goes to the tank with a box full of things he received from Rin. Lup finds him before the first item drowns and puts her hand on his shoulder. He notices a shiny ring on her finger and he wishes he could drown his own heart in the tank and just forget he once existed in a body.

“Are you sure of what you’re doing?” she asks.

“Yeah, why?” he replies nonchalantly.

“I don’t think it’s wise. To forget everything. We have to… have something,” she issues carefully.

“We have each other,” he says.

She smiles. “But what if one day we don’t?”

He stares at her for a while, and then he turns his back at her. The first item in the box, a picture of Rin collecting raspberries, lands in the tank with a splash.

Lup leaves the room.

 

Picture this: a girl and a boy sharing a bed too small for a couple, hugging as their spaceship crosses the next universe.

“Would you consider it? If it wasn’t technically most probably murder?” he asks her.

“That’s cryptic, Barold,” she replies. “Would I consider what?”

“Putting me in the tank,” he explains, desperately trying to make his voice sound jokingly. “Would you consider it? Do you ever… regret?”

“Do you?”

“No,” he says, tracing the outlines of her face with his fingers, “but you’re different than I am.”

“Not as much as you think,” she replies, and kisses him.

 

\--------

 

The room is immersed in darkness only illuminated by the light coming from the tank, the soft blue light of galaxies closed within one cosmic creature who sometimes sing songs that make him cry before he realizes.

Picture this: an elf with long braided hair, a bottle of wine in one of his hands and a receipt in the other. Just him and the fish, and the endless galaxies.

Well, just him, the fish, and apparently someone else: the air vibrates lightly and he hears a voice in his ear: “May I come in?”

“Um, yeah, sure, man,” he answers, scanning himself quickly – fortunately, he’s wearing one of his most flattering pajamas as Kravitz materializes from thin air in all his bony glory. It takes as long as a swig from Taako’s bottle for Kravitz to put on his more handsome face on (although, after that one evening, he actually starts to debate whether they aren’t equally attractive) and glance at Taako with a mix of worry and amusement in his eyes.

“What are you doing here?“ he asks softly. “Have I interrupted anything?”

Taako glances at him. He’s drunk, or at least so he tells himself when he hands Kravits the receipt. It’s a Chug’n’Squeeze receipt from their first date, the print slightly fading already.

Kraavitz must have connected the dots – the tank, the wine, the first date memorandum – but he just chuckles. “Have you just wanted to show me how much you paid for our tapas? Don’t worry, next time we can go to Fantasy Fried Chicken instead.”

“Nah, no, I went vegan anyway,” Taako says.

“So,” Kravitz continues, gently pushing the receipt back into Taako’s hand, “do you want me to… leave? So you can do something about this receipt?”

Taako finishes his bottle and throws it away behind his back. The voidfish doesn’t react to the empty clank echoing through the room, but Kravitz, no matter how reaper-y he might be, still flinches.

“Not today, my dude,” he says, stuffing the receipt into his pocket. He takes a step towards Kravitz and presses his body to his. “I have this feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“Like, that I shouldn’t just go and forget things anymore. At least not yet.”

“Can you really do that?” Kravitz laughs. “Just go and forget things?”

“Not all things. Like,” Taako smiles mischievously, his hand now on Kravitz’s back, “I still remember you like it when I do this.”

“Oh. Right. This. You remembered well.”

“I can’t forget everything,” he says, right before Kravitz kisses him. “I have to have something. And you’re a good something to have”.

The voidfish sings a single tune that seems to go deep through Taako’s bones and for a minute there he feels as if he remembered something, but then the feeling fades. One day, maybe. Today, he has new memories to make.


End file.
